This Side Up: True Positives of Testing a Champion

Let's get one thing straight. Just because our community has weathered so many other storms, through 152 previous runnings of the GI Belmont S., nobody should be complacent that we can rely indefinitely on some inborn, imperishable flair for survival.

Yes, this venerable race has endured even crises that penetrated the Turf like the tendrils of some pernicious bindweed rooted in the wider world. There was no Belmont in 1911 and 1912, because of anti-gambling laws; a couple of years later, it was being staged despite a world at war. Last year, as if anyone needs reminding, the great carnival of New York citizenry was chillingly suspended by a pandemic. And some believe that the 1968 running, sequel to the one previous Kentucky Derby contaminated by a drugs DQ, can only be properly understood in the context of the civic strife of the time.

On that occasion, Stage Door Johnny intervened to deny an awkward place in the Triple Crown pantheon for Forward Pass, who was promoted in the Derby after just holding out for second, but had meanwhile won the Preakness. This time round, it's going to be hard for any of just eight with places laid to drag public attention from the specter at the feast.

We won't get bogged down here in the merits of the Medina Spirit (Protonico) case. We can leave that, with due foreboding on behalf of an industry that can hardly benefit from the process, to the tenacity of lawyers. However things play out, the narrative Bob Baffert has proposed as exculpation will continue to be received with vexation, at the least, by many fellow horsemen.

Perhaps the most significant three words coming out of Churchill Downs, in support of his two-year exclusion from the home of the GI Kentucky Derby, referenced the “increasingly extraordinary explanations” for serial lapses in Baffert's medication regime. You can hear the irritation in every syllable. Even if Baffert happens to have been as exotically unlucky as he claims, he has been culpably inattentive whenever “another fine mess” has lurked in the routines of a Hall of Fame barn.

We all know the power of perception in the modern political agenda. Baffert and his defenders certainly do, the man himself having infamously got it into his head to describe Medina Spirit as a victim of “cancel culture”; and the owner's attorney this week depicting Baffert's treatment as “like rejecting climate change.” But these clumsy attempts to shoehorn the story into a wider context only remind us how much more coherently the anti-racing lobby can do the same. Totally unnecessarily, our sport's enemies have been gifted an opportunity to present an inherently marginal skirmish as a potentially decisive breakthrough in a great war of attrition.

That's why we now find ourselves condemned to satisfy many who will judge us on the most superficial basis. It's becoming less important to be doing the right thing than to be seen to be doing the right thing. Potentially that's a really invidious state of affairs, but we have nobody to blame but ourselves. Most of us believe that there are far more nefarious operators than Baffert in fairly plain sight. If we all had a clear conscience, in everything we do to our horses, or at least knew that we would be suitably punished if not, then we would not be in this pickle in the first place.

Saturday's card at Belmont is as deep as can nowadays be enjoyed on the East Coast, pending some reconciliation with the Breeders' Cup. It should be an exultant showcase for what we do and the way we cherish our noble charges. Instead it finds us divided between internal recrimination and the manning of barricades.

So on a day when elite sophomores either side of the ocean embrace their most exacting and historic test at 12 furlongs, let's just remind ourselves of the purpose of races like the Belmont or the G1 Epsom Derby.

These Classics are the ultimate measure of the speed-carrying Thoroughbred, designed to measure the eligibility of maturing horses to recycle those attributes that best sustain the breed. And those genetic assets must be presented in a manner that can be trusted by future generations.

It's not just backside pharmacology that is neglecting this obligation to the future of the breed. In pursuit of a fast buck, commercial breeders herd appalling numbers of mares towards unproven stallions that will, in the majority of cases, soon be exposed as purveying genetic junk. (Given the consequences, in terms of class and soundness, this may well be a factor in the undersubscription of so many big races nowadays.) In Europe, moreover, the situation is arguably even worse.

Yet again, the Epsom field is dominated by just about the only dynasty deployed by breeders aspiring to Classics. Even with Ballydoyle's unusual (and presumably significant) departure from their usual practice, vesting all their hopes in a single runner, their chosen son of Galileo (Ire) faces-among 11 opponents–six colts by sons of Galileo, and three by his half-brother Sea The Stars (Ire). That otherwise leaves just an outsider apiece for Camelot (GB) and Dubawi (Ire).

A very familiar state of affairs, by this stage. On the one hand, commercial farms there confuse precocity with elite speed, which is not the same thing at all. On the other, the most powerful end users are almost all failing to renew the historic regeneration available through speed-carrying dirt stallions.

That, of course, owes much to a distrust of the American Thoroughbred as masking its infirmities by medication. Lazy thinking, for sure, but perfectly understandable. Far less pardonable is the belief among many “professionals” in Europe-not an especially valid noun, in many cases, despite the status and resources of their patrons-that American breeders are obsessed with speed, a laughable inversion of the true state of affairs. Whatever else may be going wrong, breeders here still set a premium on the possibility of lasting two turns on the first Saturday in May.

The point about using the right genetic materials is that horsemanship will then get you everything you need without recourse to syringes. One of the most salutary performances of the year came at Belmont last weekend, when the juvenile Sense Shines made a trademark Wesley Ward debut in an off-the-turf maiden over five furlongs. Bred and owned by the trainer, he's a son of Flintshire (GB)–an exemplary racehorse, who packaged all the class we associate with the Juddmonte program, but received by the commercial market as tepidly as any other turf stallion.

Breed the right horses, and we can dispense with any trickery. We can just draw out their natural resources. That way, a horseman like Ward can get an early dirt blitz even from a colt by a grass stayer.

Obviously it's no longer an option anyway, now that the two races share the same card, but no modern trainer would dream of the GI Met Mile-Belmont double achieved by Sword Dancer, with a two-week gap; Arts and Letters, after eight days; and Conquistador Cielo just FIVE days after romping to a 1:33 track record on Memorial Day. These days, it's a rare distinction even to come back and win the Met a year after the Belmont, as did Palace Malice in 2014 (though Tonalist, who has just sired his first Grade I winner, had a pretty good go the following year).

Fortunately our industry does retain a few horsemen of genius working on the constitution of the Thoroughbred. In his 80th year, the man who put Galileo on the map–by breeding juvenile champion Teofilo (Ire) and Derby winner New Approach (Ire) from consecutive early crops–is still plowing his own furrow; still breeding and training horses whose class is partly expressed as sheer toughness.

Jim Bolger's Derby runner Mac Swiney admittedly doubles down on the dynasty he helped to create, bred on a cross that very few would risk: by New Approach out of a Teofilo mare, i.e. inbred 2×3 to Galileo. But hear this. A couple of weeks ago Mac Swiney beat barnmate Poetic Flare (Ire) (Dawn Approach {Ire}) by a nostril in the G1 Irish 2,000 Guineas. Incredibly, by the timid standards of our time, that was Poetic Flare's second Classic inside a week. Six days previously, he had been beaten a couple of lengths in the French equivalent; and that performance, in turn, followed 15 days after he had won the Guineas proper, at Newmarket, by a short head. Three Classics in three weeks, then, including two photo finishes.

Yet here we are, concluding a Triple Crown series where not one horse has shown up for all three legs. Interestingly, half of the few who have made it to the Belmont are by sires who did just that.

These Classics don't just measure our horses. They measure our horsemen: breeders, trainers, veterinarians, the owners who hire them, and the agents assisting their choices. So if we want Belmont day to be a sustainable institution, it's not just Baffert who owes it to the breed to provide a transparent and reliable test of the Thoroughbred's resources. It's all of us.